The Mount Tray application is used to facilitate the mounting and unmounting of filesystems and USB storage devices. It is included in the system tray, meaning that in can be used within any window manager that provides a system tray. If you remove the icon from the system tray, you can re-add it using Control Panel ➜ Mount Tray or by typing pc-mounttray &.

Mounting USB Drives

To access the contents of a USB drive, insert the USB drive and click the "Mount Tray" icon in the system tray. You will see a screen similar to Figure 8.10a.

Figure 8.10a: Mount Tray Example

NOTE: if an entry for the USB device does not show in "Mount Tray", click "Rescan Devices" and it should appear.

In this example, a USB thumb drive was inserted and detected while logged into the KDE desktop. Click the "Mount" button next to the "USB DISK" entry to mount that device. As the device mounts, its contents will be displayed in the default file manager for the desktop. In this example, the dolphin file manager will open as it is the default KDE file manager. If the desktop does not provide a default file manager, Mount Tray will provide an "open with" dialogue so that you can select the utility to use to browse the contents of the USB device. A list of available file managers can be found on the Files and File Sharing page.

Accessing Data on Non-PC-BSD® Partitions

Mount Tray also detects any partitions of internal drives not being used by PC-BSD. In the example shown in Figure 8.10a, this system is dual booting with Windows 7 on a Lenovo laptop. Windows 7 uses three partitions: one for the system drive, one for Lenovo recovery, and one containing the operating system. To access files on the Windows system, mount the partition labelled Windows7_OS. Table 1.4a lists which filesystems are supported by PC-BSD's Mount Tray.

When you are finished using the device, right-click Mount Tray, hover over the device entry and click the entry to unmount the device. A pop-up message will indicate that the device has been unmounted and that it is now safe to remove the device.

NOTE: do not physically remove the device without unmounting it first.